Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative, Palio
There is no slow season in health care. Whether seeing patients in between personal and professional appointments or a spike in patient visits during cold and flu season, doctors are always busy. For sales reps, this results in a greater challenge getting face time with doctors.
Sales reps may not be used to communicating in a two-minute window, but doctors, nurses and office staff are conditioned to interact that way. Last year on Pixels and Pills, I wrote about being brief and getting to the point when communicating with doctors. That still holds true, but with more doctors tethered to their smartphones and iPads, we need to use technology to change how we communicate with doctors.
Give them what they want. Sales reps need to get better at tracking information related to each sales call, including the doctor’s contact information and preferred mode of communication, patient population needs and prescription-writing activity. With a compressed amount of time to detail new medicines and deliver marketing messages, it’s important to address those most relevant to each practice. Having better information, sales reps can then implement more doctor-centric strategies and design more relevant campaigns.
Get your high tech game on. It’s important to identify creative ways to convey information. For doctors who are digitally savvy and prefer electronic communication, an interactive iPad app or digital brochure can deliver value and foster stronger relationships – all while providing an efficient and more cost-effective means of communicating beyond the traditional face-to-face call. And, physicians can review information at a time that is convenient to them – not when they have an office full of patients.
Speak in sound bites. If you can convey information in a 140-character tweet, you can do it in the real world. But if you have mere minutes of a physician’s time – whether in the office or at a virtual event – a succinct presentation style can be a real differentiator.
Recognize that it’s all in the details. While overall sales and market penetration matter immensely to the organization’s bottom line, at the individual sales rep’s level there are other metrics worth tracking in this limited-face-time environment. Average amount of time spent discussing products with a physician, requests for additional information, volume of sample product distributed or prescription-writing activity are just three of many ways to track messaging effectiveness by proxy measures. Understanding how physicians want to receive and interact information can help you determine the best technology solutions to facilitate information exchange and meet their needs.
Technology is creating new and exciting opportunities for communication that enable us to take evolving communication preferences into account when providing new product information, clinical alerts or product updates. By incorporating communication technology, electronic promotional activity, and virtual events into our communication arsenal and demonstrating depth and breadth of product knowledge, sales reps can provide valuable interactions with doctors and achieve their objectives.
Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.
